Hello!

I'm an animator and looking forward to Krita's animation development, the industry certianly needs affordable traditional animation software and innovation.

An animation style that is more popular than ever is anime, not just in Japan but also at Warner Bros and Disney. In Japan they use a software called Retas Studio. The software isn't particularly special until you get to the painting process, because it handles it in a very unique way. Over at the TVPaint forum there is a really good thread that describes how this works, users tan_zero and Jet are explaining it to the development team.

http://tvpaint.com/forum/viewtopic.php? ... 8&start=15

Jet posts a gif which sums up what it does.



Basically in a genga cel (Japanese animation frame) you mark where your shadows are in blue line, this will create two regions which can then be filled by software. The blue line must be "absorbed" as part of the shadow color to retain accuracy, I believe all color is done on one layer.



My request is could this be done in Krita?

There is a lazy fill tool in development, and planned for 3.0/3.1. It isn't meant to automatically fill the canvas, but the idea is that you can put a stroke/paint dot somewhere and Krita will detect the area you're trying to fill for you. I'll let someone else give you more details about it, but that should be pretty cool already!

PS: the tvpaint forum link doesn't work for me.

Thanks!

The link works for me, you can Google "TVPaint compared to Retas" and it should come up.

The lazy fill tool sounds like it will be similar to the "Colo & Texture Layer" (formerly LazyBrush) found in TVPaint, you can watch a video preview of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDjQNvbgzmw.

From how I understand it, you want to color shadow by including blue lines in the fill, base colors by including red lines, that way you can create all your regions using lines which saves from having to do it by hand later. This image best describes it, especially the lips!

Code: Select all

http://tvpaint.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=9218&start=15

This feature will save a lot of time for filling cell drawing. I don't think it hard to code too.

Well, let's first code the lazy brush tool, which sort of fills the same niche, and then see whether this is needed, too. Right now, we're a bit overloaded with kickstarter stretch goals, bugs, performance improvements, porting to Qt5 and so on...

Check https://phabricator.kde.org/T1121 for the mockups for layzbrush.

In terms of creating "color flats" or a "mask/stencil" DigiCel FlipBook has the best method, far better than Lazy Brush/CTG and much simpler called "Auto Fill". It works in two modes. The first mode fills the entire cel with color and then erases backwards from the outside. Here is how it works.



The second mode is actually similar to Lazy Brush but without the squiggles, so in that case perhaps it has more in common with the Fill Bucket Tool found in Toon Boom Harmony that allows you to click and drag. Here is how that works.



All these methods are good for "color flats", Auto Fill being the best and Lazy Brush/CTG being a laggy nightmare. But neither solve the problem of handling color separation lines. DigiCel FlipBook at least lets you change their color but it cannot automate it like Retas Studio can.

Let's not judge on the lazy brush method until it's fully implemented

Unlike TVPaint's method, this one will be plugged straight into Krita's core, and done by a developer who also implemented all canvas-drawing optimisations for the last few years, so there's a good chance it'll be faster than previous implementations.

Lazybrush is also more useful for all of Krita's target audiences(illustrators, game artists, animators, comic artists, matte painters) than fill-tool being able to recognise a certain colour as part of it, so hence we want to see it implemented first before looking into other workflow improvements(and also, we might be able to combine the two depending on Lazy brush's implementation )

I was referring to the one in TVPaint being a nightmare because you often need to add exclusion squiggles and be more proactive on closing gaps in your cleanup since there is no option slider for it, it has always been quicker in FlipBook or Harmony because - but I wholeheartedly understand.

I am a professional animator by the way, whether that makes me target audience I'm unsure. On a professional workstation if I was asked to give priority to new features, color separation line handling would be tops since we already use these lines to inform colorists which regions to work with, it would be quite a substantial production saving cost if it was automated. it is now no wonder to me how in Japan they are capable of producing such complicated looking cels so quickly, it's a wonderful technique.

There is a video from start to finish of this technique perhaps it can give people better insight into what it does and why it would be faster.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPHGpk4KlAk

And a video showing a process breakdown from an anime applying the technique (pencil test).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojkk9X_w0Bc

What I find really nice in TVPaint's fill tool is the ability to specify if it will use the lines from the preview (all visible layers), the current layer's only, or another layer's.

I'd like to see a simple multi-frame paint bucket fill tool with the ability to fill multiple frames with paint-bucket based on cursor position I believe it would speed up workflow as often times objects in frames movement are small transforming over time and not moving much. of course setting ending frame would be necessary to prevent unwanted paint fills.

Well, I know in the stable Krita for drawings (not animating) the g-mic comic color works really well. But for some reason when animating trying to open g-mic crashes Krita. I wouldn't mind a faster way to do what g-mic does.

Adding my vote to this. I do mostly anime-style inspired drawings and am interested in some functionality like this. I think the lazy fill tool sounds like a good start and am interested to use it when it's available.

Lazy Brush will come after the 3.0 release. The main algorithm is figured out, but the difficult bits, namely handing it data from Krita and the user interface need some time, so we're postponing it until after the end of April.

TheraHedwig wrote:Lazy Brush will come after the 3.0 release. The main algorithm is figured out, but the difficult bits, namely handing it data from Krita and the user interface need some time, so we're postponing it until after the end of April.

Thank you TheraHedwig. I'm really looking forward to seeing it in action!!